Todd Myers - Time to Think Small: How Nimble Environmental Technologies Can Solve the Planets Biggest Problems

Tromping through the steep, poison oakinfested mountains of my hometown, I held a clunky metal antenna above my head and paused to listen. A faint beep, beep, beep, and my heart leaptafter hours of deafening silence from the device that I could have sworn was older than I was, we were getting close to a young male puma on the move. It was the summer before my junior year of college, and I was interning with an ecology lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I spent most days like this, attempting to track down individual pumas to get close enough to download data from their radio collars, with painfully mixed success thanks to the thickly forested terrain. As an avid hiker and aspiring wildlife conservationist, I didnt begrudge the work, but with an iPhone in my back pocket that could tell me the exact location of the nearest Pokmon or the weather in Nairobi, I repeatedly found myself thinking there must be a better way.

As it turns out, I was not alone in that feeling. Two years later I joined the staff of WILDLABS, a nonprofit collaborative and vibrant global online community of like-minded engineers, makers, and conservationists working to build and implement better environmental technologies. Now I lead the WILDLABS research program and get to spend my days working to help conservationists access the resources and support they need to leverage these rapidly advancing tools.

This was the story I shared with Todd Myers when he asked how I got involved in conservation technology during an interview for this book. I also shared that my frustrations in the field were far from unique. Conservation scientists all over the world have similar experiences of this juxtapositionwatching as technologies make every aspect of our lives more convenient, efficient, and economical, yet having only outdated and expensive tools with which to protect and conserve the ecosystems that quite literally sustain us.

In the pages of Time to Think Small, Myers provides a timely and insightful investigation into the power of small technologies to revolutionize environmental stewardship, raising reasons for hope amidst the overwhelm experienced by so many in the face of todays environmental challenges. One of the central messages throughout the following chapters is that much of conservation technologys power lies in decentralization. Myers demonstrates that personal technologies present the opportunity to move beyond our historical reliance on top-down political solutions and into an era of harnessing the collective power of many small efforts. As a beekeeper, he likens these efforts to individuals in a hive, all contributing to something larger than themselves. A big part of my job, and the reason WILDLABS was created, is to connect and support these individual solutions, bringing them into a collaborative ecosystem much like a hive, where together they can produce remarkable results. While empowering individual efforts does foster innovation and new ways of thinking, without proper support systems it can also lead to duplication of efforts and competition for limited funding in an already under-resourced arena. Like any hive, it needs communication, collaboration, and resources to thrive.

Similarly, the solutions put forward are of little use if they are not accessible to the communities that need them most. As Myers details in this book, small technologies are becoming an increasingly important part of environmental stewardship, but access to these technologies remains more readily available to some groups than others. In a survey of the global conservation technology community by